When one discusses the poetry of Hugh MacDiarmid one is forced to make an evaluation of the importance of ideas in poetry or to put it another way to discuss how ideas are related if at all to poetry. (p. 124)

MacDiarmid's favourite method seems to be a dialectic one. He may have learned this from a study of Communism but he was talking about Hegel before Communism came into his poetry. In this method he veers from one idea to its opposite. And very often he comes down on neither side. (p. 126)

Now clearly the dialectical movement in poetry is not uncommon and can be very exciting. However if the poem remains on the level of the idea no final result can ever be arrived at. And often one feels with MacDiarmid that in fact he does not resolve his poems as poetry. The ideas are built up...